John Draisey

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Arnold is really good at explosions and smoke. You have to write your simulations to .VBD format, but from there Arnold does a great job of illuminating your explosions without any lighting hacks. The Blackbody data just works.

Arnold also has simple render settings and the ability to add more detail (Volume Displacement) on top of the VBD data.

I'm John Draisey, a 3D generalist who has used Nuke for compositing the last few years. I recently started diving into Houdini's Compositing Ops and it looks like there's a way to do zdepth defocus on EXR files. But I'm having trouble using the Arnold Renderer Zdepth pass to get camera bokeh. The distance information when I activate the pixel inspecter is in the 30~60 Thousand range rather than the 0-1 range that I've seen in this tutorial: